No Such Thing As `Lyme Anxiety'

June 23, 1998|The Morning Call

To the Editor:

This is in response to the article titled "Lyme Anxiety yields cottage industry," in the June 14 Sunday Morning Call. In the unabbreviated version of that article which appeared in the Los Angels Times, the author, Mark Fritz makes reference to two studies that support the notion of there actually being such a thing as Lyme Anxiety. Both of the studies, one at Yale and one at the University of Maryland, have met with harsh criticism from me: they are flawed severely in many ways.

There is no such thing as "Lyme Anxiety." When people get a tornado warning and take shelter in the basement, we don't say they have "Tornado Anxiety." When people get bit by a tick and develop symptoms, they take shelter by seeing a doctor. The doctor shouldn't turn these people away because his head is filled with quacked up notions about a political anxiety. Yet that is what is happening time and time again because of the much publicized quackery coming from pretty clearly biased folks who's eye is only on cutting health care costs in the immediate present.

An infectious disease that yields disability if left untreated is not an acceptable target for cost cutting. I am the coordinator for LymeSig, a Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Inc. I have had Lyme disease for 20 years. Fortunately, neither Mensa nor LymeSig hold any collective opinions, which are the individual responsibility of the writers.